Service Catalog & the Cloud: How to Prepare for the Coming Storm

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Andrew Kramer, VP Client Solutions, PMG.net

Cloud computing is here. Powered by mature virtualization technologies, public and private cloud initiatives are implemented at best of breed enterprises. If you're just getting started, users might be wondering why they can get cloud services in minutes, but getting similar services internally is slow and often more expensive.

Fixing this gap between the online world and "in-house" world has taken on new urgency. It is now imperative that you provide equivalent services, with equivalent speed, agility, price and performance.

Providing cloud services in a structured manner requires a proper governance framework. Turns out ITILv3 and the tenets of IT service management fit quite nicely.

First and foremost, you must provide an online catalog of available cloud services. From self-service, to automated provisioning, to dynamic billing, your service catalog should provide all the components you need to have a best-of-breed cloud computing governance and automation framework.

This webinar will also cover common pitfalls and risks, including:

- Making sure you are not too narrowly focused, ensuring you can cover not only VMs, but also include network, storage, and applications.
- Ensuring the ability to limit offerings by role, entitlement, or location
- Creating flexible user self-service forms, bundles, pricing, and SLA options
- Designing the automated delivery, including approvals, human tasks, and automated provisioning
- Integrating your service catalog with all of your other tools to provide for a true end-to-end service

Hyper-converged storage is turning out to be the buzz phrase of the storage industry in 2015, one with as many confusing and contradictory definitions as there are vendors. In theory, the combining of server and storage tiers into a single entity should deliver better application performance and lower infrastructure costs. In practice, your mileage will vary.

Join us for this webinar where industry expert Jon Toigo – chairman and co-founder of the Data Management Institute – will help to identify key criteria for making the right infrastructure decision for your business. Mr. Toigo will offer his key criteria in selecting a hyper-converged infrastructure model and he will survey the offerings of leading vendors to identify the “gotchas,” trade-offs and lock-ins of each option so you find the best fit for your company.

Network Managers have a tall order in IT organizations today. Typically, they are tasked with two conflicting business directives:

1. Deliver optimal end-user experience for networked applications

2. Reduce the operational cost of the network, or reduce the IT budget

But the knee jerk approach of “throwing bandwidth at the problem” while potentially improving end user experience, is hardly the answer to cost management and network optimization.

In this webinar, Chris Greer will discuss the challenges that result from the common approaches utilized today in capacity planning and, outline a new way, comprised of 4 actionable steps to optimizing the bandwidth you may already have.

Network Managers have a tall order in IT organizations today. Typically, they are tasked with two conflicting business directives:

1. Deliver optimal end-user experience for networked applications

2. Reduce the operational cost of the network, or reduce the IT budget

But the knee jerk approach of “throwing bandwidth at the problem” while potentially improving end user experience, is hardly the answer to cost management and network optimization.

In this webinar, Chris Greer will discuss the challenges that result from the common approaches utilized today in capacity planning and, outline a new way, comprised of 4 actionable steps to optimizing the bandwidth you may already have.

Looking for an edge in how you sell and market to customers? Successful
companies know their customers and prospects better, connect to them faster, and make better data-driven decisions when they have the right data at the right moment. Salesforce Data.com brings the best B2B customer data into the #1 CRM so you get more insights, more sales opportunities, and cleaner data—all right where your team works, helping boost your sales productivity.

Join us to see how Salesforce Data.com customers see increased CRM adoption, shorter sales cycles, and faster growth.

As companies explore how they can leverage OpenStack to advance their business, they often ask if OpenStack is really “production-ready.” Through co-founding OpenStack, running one of the world’s largest OpenStack clouds, and managing OpenStack private clouds for enterprises, we know what is takes to make OpenStack production-ready. In this session, Justin Shepard, a Rackspace distinguished architect, will discuss what it means to be "production-ready" and how we designed Rackspace Private Cloud Powered By OpenStack to run production workloads. Register today to join this insightful and informative discussion.

As companies explore how they can leverage OpenStack to advance their business, they often ask if OpenStack is really “production-ready.” Through co-founding OpenStack, running one of the world’s largest OpenStack clouds, and managing OpenStack private clouds for enterprises, we know what is takes to make OpenStack production-ready. In this session, Justin Shepard, a Rackspace distinguished architect, will discuss what it means to be "production-ready" and how we designed Rackspace Private Cloud Powered By OpenStack to run production workloads. Register today to join this insightful and informative discussion.

As companies explore how they can leverage OpenStack to advance their business, they often ask if OpenStack is really “production-ready.” Through co-founding OpenStack, running one of the world’s largest OpenStack clouds, and managing OpenStack private clouds for enterprises, we know what is takes to make OpenStack production-ready. In this session, Justin Shepard, a Rackspace distinguished architect, will discuss what it means to be "production-ready" and how we designed Rackspace Private Cloud Powered By OpenStack to run production workloads. Register today to join this insightful and informative discussion.

As companies explore how they can leverage OpenStack to advance their business, they often ask if OpenStack is really “production-ready.” Through co-founding OpenStack, running one of the world’s largest OpenStack clouds, and managing OpenStack private clouds for enterprises, we know what is takes to make OpenStack production-ready. In this session, Justin Shepard, a Rackspace distinguished architect, will discuss what it means to be "production-ready" and how we designed Rackspace Private Cloud Powered By OpenStack to run production workloads. Register today to join this insightful and informative discussion.

IT Service Management systems are great collectors of stuff – requests, changes, survey results, etc. What they’re not so great at is sorting out what is most important and helping us to act on it! That is until HP Service Anywhere.

Join us in this session to see how HP Service Anywhere helps end users act on their needs, their assets; agents act on requests, incidents, changes, and releases.

Find out how Service Anywhere helps transform the way IT service desk agents work – boosting service quality and increasing productivity – all powered by a big data platform, provide high scalability and rapid processing of unstructured and structured data to deliver current and relevant information.

Join us to learn how the industry’s first Big Data service desk delivers service insights once thought impossible.

In today’s online and mobile environment, financial service organizations are struggling to comply with a multitude of regulatory requirements that impede online and mobile customer signups. What is the best way to signup customers while still complying with regulations and mitigating fraud?

Join us for a live webinar, “Optimizing customer signup flows in your mobile and web channels” and listen in as experts in ID authentication and identity verification discuss various strategies that will help you:

Don’t loose another customer because you can’t offer a real-time sign-up process through your online and mobile channels. Join us and learn how to optimize your sign-up flows, and enable anytime, anywhere through any digital channel customer account opening.

With more than 100 applications in production, a leading bank needed to reduce the time required to deploy and update its apps. By implementing an automation solution from HP, the bank reduced the application time-to-deploy by nearly 8X. Now the bank follows a seamless and standardized approach for deployment.

To realize the full benefits of the cloud, you must choose a cloud that fits your needs and supports your organization’s cloud workloads. In this webinar, we will discuss the results of a Forrester Consulting study that show why capacity management is essential to your cloud transformation strategy. You will learn how capacity optimization tools manage workloads in the cloud and help you:

• Gain visibility into capacity utilization at the resource, service, and business level.
• Support timely decision-making on IT investments.
• Increase agility, reduce IT costs, and minimize risks.

Learn how capacity management will help you understand and optimize your environment to support effective decision-making aligned to business priorities.

Ineffective new product development (NPD) pipeline management is a condition that affects many organizations looking for sustainable results from their new product efforts. In most cases, organizations struggle to understand what the symptoms they experience are telling them about their pipeline, and how to focus their energy on initiatives that will make the most impact. In this webcast, CA and Kalypso will review the most common indicators of a faulty NPD process and help diagnose the causes.

Attendees will learn:
- The common pain points and symptoms that indicate poor NPD pipeline management
- Why organizations experience these symptoms, and the underlying causes that produce these pains
- How to tailor portfolio management principles to treat the symptoms of poor NPD pipeline management, including example that illustrates how portfolio management can drive sustainable results

Resolving an incident can be a complex process that takes a lot of time and many people. According to the 2014 State of On-Call Report, most teams report that it takes 10-30 minutes to resolve an incident and on average, 5 people are needed to help with resolution.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, Jason Hand will present best practices and tips for surviving every stage of the firefight - from when an alert comes in to pulling reports after it’s over. Join us to see how we do it at VictorOps.

Why invest time, effort, and political capital to adopt DevOps and PaaS? Chris will compare PaaS capabilities and benefits against IaaS++ Clouds, and describe how tactically extending DevOps processes to Cloud environments accelerates business agility. During the last seven years, DevOps and PaaS have moved from curiosity to mandate. Do the disciplines have a clear future and obtainable payback, or will mainstream adopters become disillusioned by complexity and fragility. In this session, you will learn:

Chris Haddad is an industry thought leader, hands-on practitioner, and SaaS pioneer. Chris has led many successful startup software teams who used agile best practices, rapid iterations, and emerging architecture components to eclipse incumbent providers. He has advised Fortune 500, Global 2000 organizations, and valley startups on software strategies, roadmaps, and best practices. Chris has led the application platform and data management research teams at Gartner, and is an accomplished conference speaker (Gartner Catalyst, SOA Symposium, WSO2Con, and more) whose goal is to make you and your team successful. Chris has written for TechWell.com, OpenSource.com, InfoQ, and GigaOm.

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) - Keeping it all together to make CSI thrive addresses the many elements that perish a CSI plan, program and process. Many organizations are struggling with maintaining an effective CSI process to implement improvements that align with the business priority, manages cost effectively and delivers value. Thriving in CSI addresses the most important elements to succeeding in CSI that are simplified shifts to making CSI work in your organization.

• Addressing the complications, struggles and obstacles of successful CSI.
• Setting up CSI with ITIL® is like setting up a store with no inventory.
• The "PPTC"—People, Process, and Technology Connection to empower the organization to improve.
• Ways to keeping CSI intact to make it thrive.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say. So what type of picture do you have around your disciplines of incident and problem management? Can you see the trends? Can you identify areas for improvements in speed, costs and user experience?

In this session we will discuss some of the results of shifting left and also skipping right to create a dynamic service environment based upon both industry best practices and actionable data.

We will also look at some of the methods and improvements to the Edge SaaS ITSM tool that you can utilize to improve this strategic area of the service desk and IT operations management.

Some of the topics we will cover include:

- How to leverage templates to increase the speed of ticket creation
- Proper alignment between services and SLAs
- Using service notifications to improve messaging and brand
- Creating a problem investigation from an incident
- Developing a process around which incidents should become problems

Following a well-designed Incident Management process is crucial element of what is often referred to as the “Iron Triangle” for IT Service Management. In fact, this process “iron triangle” is “table stakes” for any IT organization—it is not a “nice to have”! Businesses expect their IT organizations to be able to consistently and effectively handle Incidents as well as Requests and Changes. Most organizations start their ITSM journeys by implementing the “iron triangle”, but because they’ve not taken the time to develop their Service Catalog, these critical processes are usually implemented from an IT perspective. So how could having a Service Catalog before implementing Incident Management help? Join Doug Tedder as he discusses five PDG (Pretty Darn Good) ways the Service Catalog enhances Incident Management.

Are you looking for best practices for integrating and implementing solutions more quickly and gaining control over spend, performance and risk? The IT4IT ™ Forum of The Open Group is working to establish open standards for managing the business of IT.

The IT4IT Reference Architecture provides the missing link between industry standard best practices and technology solutions. It provides a foundation for the IT operating model and a blueprint for accelerating IT’s transition to becoming a service broker to the business.

Come learn more about this holistic approach that spans the entire IT lifecycle, with an emphasis on IT Operations.

IT organizations invest huge amounts of time and money in incident and problem management, but does this really create any value for their customers? In this live video panel, Barclay, Daniel and Stuart will discuss different viewpoints of these two processes, and how they can form part of our overall approach to customer experience.

Topics to be discussed will include:
· Are incidents and problems really different things?

· Shouldn’t customers expect services to work properly without incidents?

· Why do IT departments spend so much time and money on resolving incidents, when customers would rather see investment in new capabilities?

·How does incident management contribute to value creation?

· Who should be doing incident management? Is it really something that should be left to the service desk alone?

· How can these two processes contribute to customer experience, and why does this make a difference?

Today's IT organizations recognize the importance of incident and problem management in ensuring customer satisfaction, but often fail to allocate attention or budget to match its importance. At the same time, budgetary pressures, delivery demands and resource constraints are forcing those same organizations to recognize that they now need to "work smarter, not harder." With all of the tools, methods and sources of best practice guidance available, how does one select what is the best fit for an organization? How can you be sure that your improvements are going to result in the kinds of tangible improvements your sponsors and customers will recognize and value? What role does “customer-centricity” play in this? In this presentation, we’ll examine these questions, highlight some important sources of leverage and identify some practical steps that your organization can use to quickly “turbocharge” your response capability.

According to the 2014 HDI Desktop Support Practices & Salary Report, remote control tops the “must have” list of technologies to successfully provide desktop support to end users. Unfortunately, many service desks are using legacy remote access tools that often leave security gaps putting companies at higher risk of data breaches. This is not a new or unknown issue. Often, IT departments don’t realize the tools they’re using to provide tech support are also being compromised by hackers to plant malware and steal data. According to the 2013 Trustwave Global Security Report, legacy remote access tools such as RDP and VNC are cited year after year as the most common attack pathways used by hackers. So if remote control tools top the must-have list, what can service desks do to securely support their users without putting their organizations at risk?

This session will educate desktop support professionals on how hackers are targeting legacy systems and what they need to do to secure their environment.

"To protect and serve"" is a good motto for IT, as there seems to be an expectation that IT exists only to create new technology solutions in response to the demands of the business: to serve. It's not true. The Information Technology department exists to protect the IT interests of the owners of the organisation whilst also serving IT's customers and users. The two don't always align.

IT is entrusted with custody of the organisation's IT assets. Sometimes it is not in the best interests of the organisation to abandon those investments or to increase the risks to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the information, in order to meet demands for new IT from the customers.

Join IT Skeptic, consultant and commentator, Rob England as he explores IT's evolving role in striking a balance in extracting maximum value from existing investments against facilitating the generation of value from new investments.

This session is approved for 1 Continual Professional Development (CPD) priSM credit.

Creating effective metrics is essential for IT Service Management (ITSM) to evolve as an increasingly critical part of cross-domain service delivery, optimization and planning. However, no two IT organizations are the same, and metrics for measuring IT efficiencies, costs, values and requirements need to be tailored to realistic levels of IT maturity and grounded in unique IT organizational environments.

When a really good idea, a truly compelling service, or an “I-cannot-live-without-this” product hits the street our reaction is often “How come we didn’t think of this sooner?” Whether it’s an iPhone or iPad or a step-up bumper on a pickup truck, we are smacking our foreheads and grunting “Doh!”. DevOps is a really good idea. Merging Development with the Operations side of the house creates synergies and efficiencies that have never before been possible. From automated deployment to fewer bad changes to a robust release management process, it’s time for DevOps.

Join Pink Elephant’s George Spalding and CA’s Robert Stroud to hear about this “Doh!” moment and how it impacts IT service management.

This session is approved for 1 Continual Professional Development (CPD) priSM credit.

New disruptive trends are challenging IT service providers to rethink the way they plan, deploy and deliver services. Today’s IT must deliver a world class “user experience” while allowing for more frequent and rapid application deployment that supports multiple channels with strong consideration to cloud, mobility, consumer experience and more.

This session will discuss the delivery of a high performance “support center” that can help an IT organization meet these challenges by leveraging ITIL and other good practice guidance as the IT organization transitions from reactive service support to being a proactive service provider.

This session is approved for 1 Continual Professional Development (CPD) priSM credit.

IT service management forms the backbone of any forward looking IT infrastructure. Whether it’s the latest trends, techniques or strategies, the content in this channel will help you optimize your organization's IT operations.